The Philosophical Background and Scientific Legacy of E. B. Titchener's Psychology by Christian Beenfeldt

Author:Christian Beenfeldt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Heidelberg

4.4 The Elementary Units as Sensationistic

Here I will comment, finally, one the classes or types of elementary units recognized by Titchenerian psychology. In his 1909 work, A Text-Book of Psychology, Titchener recognizes three such classes: sensations, images and affections.13 Sensations are the characteristic elements of perceptions, the “sights and sounds” we enjoy in response to environmental stimulation (Titchener 1909, p. 48). Images are the constituents of our ideas and they are so similar to sensations that the two “are not seldom confused” (Titchener 1909, p. 48). Affections are the characteristic elements of emotions such as love, hate, joy and sorrow (Titchener 1909, p. 48).

Images, Titchener suggests in the Text-Book, may simply be sensations. Usually a sensation and its corresponding image are said to differ in that the image is more pale, less intense and of a shorter duration (Titchener 1926, p. 198), but these are all “differences of degree, and not of kind” (Titchener 1926, p. 198). This account suggests the possibility of combining images and sensations into one elemental group, presumably with images (the qualitatively inferior copy of sensations) understood as the dependent product of sensations. Titchener considers a range of experimental findings (Titchener 1896, pp. 29–30) that lend weight to this hypothesis. Yet, he reaches no firm conclusion on the issue (Titchener 1926, pp. 197–200). Six years later, in A Beginner’s Psychology, he writes that it is “very doubtful if there is any real psychological difference between sensation and image” (Titchener 1920a, p. 73, italics removed).

Whatever the ultimate number of elemental categories turns out to be, it is clear that in Titchener’s view, sensations are the ruling constituents in human mental life. They are ultimately responsible for perceptions (a “group of the sensations”) (Titchener 1901–1905, p. 127), images (which differ from sensations in degree, not kind),14 and ideas (which differ “from a perception only by the fact that [they are] made up wholly of images”) (Titchener 1926, p. 376). Indeed, Titchener exhorts us to recognize that there “is no fundamental psychological difference between the perception and the idea” (Titchener 1896, p. 148).15 We might, of course, be tempted by common usage “to employ ‘perception’ to denote what is now before us, and ‘idea’ to denote what is remembered or imagined” (Titchener 1896, pp. 148–9) but we should resist this temptation and “remind ourselves that, in principle, the two processes are one and the same” (Titchener 1896, p. 149). Indeed, Titchener goes as far as to adopt the policy of using the words indiscriminately (Titchener 1896, p. 149).16 Clearly, Titchenerian psychology is deeply sensationistic in nature.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.